Indigenous Cinema in Expansion: Challenges and Promises of an Intercultural Relationship

This article discusses some of the current challenges and promises in the intercultural relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous curators and filmmakers in the largest Indigenous film festival in Brazil, Cine Kurumin. This annual film festival, established in 2011, takes place in Indigenous rural villages and in Brazilian metropolises, attracting all sorts of audiences. The festival is open to Indigenous and non-Indigenous filmmakers who produce audiovisual material focusing on Indigenous topics around the world. It supports creative processes, by organizing scriptwriting workshops, for example, while also promoting the circulation of Indigenous films through partnerships with television channels. As Indigenous audiovisual production grows, it also diversifies, encompassing ever more themes, styles, and directors, expanding formats and including different perspectives. Based on postcolonial and decolonial studies, this article presents new perspectives for an expanding cinema-one in which Indigenous filmmakers and their films are circulating more and more in non-thematic film festivals, receiving prizes and disseminating their own discourse and gaze to a larger and more diverse audience, which creates possibilities for intercultural interaction and dialogue. At the same time, the realization of Cine Kurumin is evidence of the ability of Indigenous audiovisual production to stimulate a promising intercultural relationship between filmmakers, curators, and the general audience